Interpretations of Czech composer Bedřich Smetana and his music have shifted as frequently as the political contexts in which they were written. This book examines not just Smetana, but also the scholar-politicians who have imagined and reimagined him and his works since the nineteenth century. During the 1870s, Smetana helped found a powerful nationalist organization called the Umelecka beseda ("Artistic Society," or UB), whose members produced the earliest scholarship on the composer as part of their calls for political action. Within the increasingly radicalized discourses of the...